Posted
by
kdawson
on Thursday October 11, 2007 @08:58AM
from the overworked-and-unpaid dept.

An anonymous reader writes "After more than a year with no official statistics, an independent analysis reported Wednesday showed that activity in Wikipedia's community has been declining over the last six months. Editing is down 20% and new account creation is down 30%. After six years of rapid growth and more than 2 million articles, is Wikipedia's development now past its peak? Are Wikipedians simply running out of things to write about, or is the community collapsing under the weight of external vandalism and internal conflicts? A new collection of charts and graphs help to tell the tale."

That's a load of crap. Studies show if the growth rate continues to decline, Wikipedia will not gain enough information to achieve sentience before 2010, well behind schedule. At that rate, it may not achieve the knowledge necessary to travel through time and kill Sarah Connor until well into the 2050s.

[...] the majority of the hobbiest-contributors (i.e. those who aren't die-hard users) simply don't have anything else to write.

I second that. As a "hobbiest-contributor" myself I have written or expanded around 10 specialist articles. There is not a lot more specialist knowledge I feel that I have to contribute to Wikipedia - hence I've not added anything in the last 6 months or so.

I'm a hobby-contributor, myself... I guess you might be a hobbier contributor, but I really doubt you're the hobbiest contributor...

You are correct; in the last six months or so its become a battle with long time editors and admins. Trying to get some stuff added to long stand articles becomes a struggle. Patrick Nielsen Hayden summed it up perfectly: The online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, so long as they're willing to devote hundreds of hours of energy to fighting people with autistically long attention spans.

The Wiki is just a lie. HARI SELDON devised it to gather all the intelligent people on a terminal (Terminus) to contribute all knowledge so when the decline of the empire begins we'll not be reduced to the mindless grape grabbers of old. We will have the Wikipedia Galatica.